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Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Phrase of the day...

...is duro blandito. Literally, it means "hard soft", and is a Salvadorean oxymoron used to describe the complexities of life. It is also a type of cheese, which seems appropriate somehow. Salvadoreans are practical, so they like to pack as much use into everything as humanly possible. Even speech, I suppose. :)

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I feel a bit like I have been grading non-stop since Sunday. Now that it is mid-unit quiz season and I teach 100 kids, I could easily spend hours grading just quizzes every week. I gave a round of practice quizzes in each class, followed by quiz makeup points, which all added to the load of stuff to grade and return even before administering the actual quizzes!

I've noticed that my new students appear to have only been taught rote math their whole lives. This is frustrating, even with the topics they are good at, because they can't explain any of the concepts to me. (The worst is when they've learned something solely by rote, didn't understand the concept, and now do the rote procedure incorrectly.) I have to keep reminding myself that I only have control over now, over what happens in my classroom. I don't know how much I can fix in a year, but I will try, obviously.